The End of the Artistic Priesthood

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In the latest installment of our ongoing series, Stuart Moulder, General Manager of PC Games at Microsoft Games Group, describes an emerging, organic way for interactive entertainment to develop. Could this be the future of digital creativity?

When I look forward to games of the future I see possibilities along three dimensions  technical, creative and social.

Technology is in many ways the easiest to speak to  the growth in power of 3D graphics is outpacing Moore’s Law by nearly 2 to 1. The visual possibilities in real-time rendered environments over the next few years will be stunning. But others can speak to those possibilities with greater clarity and deeper technical insight than I can.

On the creative front, games must push forward aggressively to match the pace of technology. We can and will learn to address a broader range of content in our games and reach more people than the narrow demographic we speak to today.

And socially, online and connected games will pioneer new modes of interactivity. Games empower their players and online games have the potential to give those who are otherwise socially powerless a voice and persona and a way to realize their full humanity.

Each of these dimensions of growth: the technical, the creative and the social are exciting in their own right. But I want to look at games and their development from a different perspective; one that combines all three of these dimensions and has, perhaps, the greatest potential to completely alter our perceptions about what entertainment is and can be.

Games are the entertainment manifestation of the digital revolution. Whatever others may mean by this phrase, I mean it to represent a fundamental alteration in how we approach media and its creation. In the pre-digital world, media was analog and difficult to mix and alter. A kind of priesthood grew up around the most popular forms of entertainment and media  movie studios, recording studios and music companies, theatrical companies, publishers. Rigid rules were laid down, organizations were birthed, barriers to entry erected. You were either in, with a card to prove it (SAG for example), or you were just the hoi polloi  a non-entity.

The digital revolution fundamentally alters that equation. If you want to create studio-perfect music recordings, you can do it today with off the shelf equipment for less than $10k. Completely digital, this equipment is orders of magnitude more powerful than what the priesthood had in its top-of-the-line studios scant decades ago.

Many people imagine that we’re still fighting the digital revolution, but actually it is over. The first generations to grow up fully digital have been born and are claiming their birthright. Only luddites of the older generations fail to recognize this new truth: there are no rules in this digital world beyond those of society and the bounds of our collective imagination. The end of the tyranny of the priesthood is in sight.

The entertainment medium of greatest potential in this brave new world is one built to this manifesto  a medium that empower the participant as much as the creator. A medium shaped by those who partake of it, not just the anointed few who made it. Digital games, video games, computer games, whatever we call them, have always been the clearest manifestation of this new order. Made by iconoclasts with no greater purpose than to entertain, they have pushed digital technology faster and further than it would have ever gone without them. If not for games, would corporate desktops boast of audio capabilities? 3D? CD drives? Eventually, perhaps, but certainly not as quickly or as broadly without games pushing the envelope.

The most amazing thing about interactive entertainment is the way it embraces the malleability of our digital reality. Games are not just packaged entertainment “goods” to be consumed, and then discarded. Increasingly the tools of creation are shared with the consumer  and the line between creator and audience blurred. You can simply play a game like Dungeon Siege, but if you want more, you have the tools to create your own vision of a great role-playing adventure.

None of this is new to game players. Mods and Mod communities have been growing for the last decade as more and more games ship with editors and tools to allow the audience to create their own missions, add-ons, even entire games.

But let’s push this paradigm. As the medium has matured, we have found it necessary to grow games in a more and more modular way. The sheer complexity and scope of what games do now demands it. Think of a game as being a kind of digital organism. Its heart is a game engine mated to a real-time rendering system that manifests the “reality” we perceive. This engine receives inputs from multiple sensory organs  mouse, keyboard, joystick, network and parses the input data to the correct systems for processing. Physics engine, Artificial Intelligence, collision system, animation system, etc. Each of these organs is dependent to some degree on the whole, but each must be written and maintained as a separate, modular whole.

So imagine a game and its game universe as an organic entity of multiple, interactive parts. In this paradigm, the creator could theoretically do little more then establish a core engine, some ground rules for good behavior/interaction with this engine and then put the organism out there for the world to work on.

In today’s world, this won’t work. As currently conceived, modules are too fragile. They are purpose-built and highly dependent on not only the core engine, but also the other modules (organs).

But if we look at real organisms, then steal a page or two from nanotech, we can imagine a future digital organism more robust and (strangely) more organic than those of today. Our organs must have some capacity to endure unexpected conditions  they must be resilient, if not actually fail-safe. And they must be able to self-repair to some degree. The digital organism should have the ability to self-validate and to reject organs that don’t conform to its rules of inclusion.

I am not describing a self-aware, intelligent system in the classic (will-o-the-wisp) sense of Artificial Intelligence. This is simply the infrastructure for a digital entity that can support multiple creative participants. Like today, an initial act of creation is sparked by a small group of people. But the digital entity is organic, designed from the ground up to be grown by many and in ways not conceived by its original parents.

Today we see massively multi-player worlds and imagine that better versions will be larger, more robust and more interactive. But as long as the ratio of creators to participants is skewed 100,000 to 1 (or 1,000,000 to 1 as their popularity grows), the appetite for consumption will always exceed the capacity of creation.

Now imagine this idea turned inside out. You enter a world partially defined and formed, but the boundaries are hazy and open. Those who have the skill, the desire and the will to pioneer and create will expand the boundaries of this world. Creator and consumer are no longer separate roles, trapped on opposite sides of a cardboard package. Rather, these roles are assumed naturally by each participant. The initial conception and implementation of the world is a seed, a beginning, whose end is unknown and unknowable. Wouldn’t it be a lot more exciting to explore this kind of world? A world like our own, where there are always new discoveries, and no one knows how it will all end up.

In the meta-world to this new, organic, multi-created world, there are other considerations. Notions about intellectual property ownership must be rethought. A meta-system to help filter the dross from the gold must be developed (the world of Internet shopping has been experimenting with user-customized versions of such systems for a while). Business models must be re-architected to support creators in all their manifestations. Marketing and messaging become especially challenging — and I predict specific participant targeted messaging becomes prevalent over the current broad-brush approaches favored today.

The “stars” of this new world of entertainment will rise and fall rapidly, their reputations spread by digital word of mouth in minutes and hours. Trends will form, peak and evaporate before today’s linear media can detect their existence. Creators with staying power will cultivate a unique style that characterize their work and distinguishes it from the masses that confuse admiring imitation for interesting work.

In this organic world, the harsh rules of evolution will assert themselves. Paradoxically, niches will form and survive  rare and esoteric expressions will find their own audience and survive where today they cannot even be heard.

To me, this is the future: an entertainment world where the brightest talent has a clearer, straighter path to express itself than ever before. One that’s organic, limitless universe with odd, quirky corners capable of finding an audience and thriving. A world where artists, not lawyers or MBAs, hold sway.

So how do we get there? We need technology to develop robust architectures that can sustain a digital organism. We need a rethinking of the creative paradigm  a move away from the old priesthood model, to one that more fully embraces the full implications of the digital revolution. And new social structures will need to evolve to support multiple participant creation where time and space separate those involved. These are not, in my view, huge obstacles.

I believe it is inevitable that trends along these lines will continue. We will reach this conclusion whether we will it or not. Media that have tried to buck the digital tide have failed. The key is not to fight the power of digital tools, but to embrace them in all their implications.

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